We Need to Talk About Kevin movie tie-in

A Novel

By: Lionel Shriver

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

""Impossible to put down. . . . Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.” — Boston Globe

Acclaimed author Lionel Shriver's gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry

Shriver’s resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them reverberates with the haunting power of high hopes shattered by dark realities.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Like Shriver’s charged and incisive later novels, including So Much for That and The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a piercing, unforgettable, and penetrating exploration of violence, family ties, and responsibility.

I ALMOST returned this book

if it weren't for the reviews that said "stick with it", I would have returned it. The first few hours made me homicidal. Seriously, watching grass grow would have made a more pleasurable experience. Note to the author: please do future readers a favor and tear out those first 4-5 chapters, burn them, sacrifice a goat and republish. Then never speak of those chapters again.

Dark. Don't Shy Away from the Topic

Would you try another book from Lionel Shriver and/or Coleen Marlo?

Yes

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

It was hard to connect with the mother in this story.

What about Coleen Marlo’s performance did you like?

Well read.

Was We Need to Talk About Kevin worth the listening time?

Yes.

Any additional comments?

There are lots of Kevin's in our society and all of them have mothers. It's a dark, at times too dark for me, story.

Excruciating

I want to explain, or perhaps justify, my rating of this powerful story. It would have had a higher score if the first half of the book wasn't overburdened by overwriting by the author. She seemed to feel the need to prove that this is a "literary" family drama, and for me, at least, this just diminished the impact of those overly-wordy passages. as the "crisis" escalates in the second part of the book, the prose became sharper and more urgent, and the book was batter for it.
Why did I title this "excruciating" ? For me, it was like watching a multi-car pile-up, knowing a disaster was happening or about to happen and feeling helpless to prevent it. I literally had to stop listening at times to take a break from some of the awfulness.
It is a compelling, emotional story; not one I'd rate as "enjoyable", but definetely intense. There are plot inconsistancies that I'd question ( wouldn't Eva at least take Kevin to be evaluated by a psychologist when she had so many issues and suspicions about him ? How could her husband be so relentlessly passive and obtuse in the face of Kevin's obvious behavior ?), but it would have been a different story. *spoiler* I guessed fairly early on that Franklin was never going to read or respond to Eva's letters, and why that was the case. As for the ending, it was the " right" one, suggesting hope even for the mother/son relationship.
Colleen Marlo was absolutely brilliant as narrator.

For Every Person Who Knows a Kevin

This is a chilling story about what happens went parent(s) refuse to see their child as he really is. From the beginning Kevin is troubled; Eva's sees it, but Franklin refuses and that fuels Kevin's desires to torture his mother. I really enjoyed the epistolary format of this novel. That made Eva's story even more personal and made the reader feel as though she's reading very private correspondence.

great one

I was immersed in the book from the beginning. while by the end the surprise ending was not so much a surprise, the writing was fantastic and kept me in suspense.